Bilingual newspaper provides passionate voice as it faces own challenges

By Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
For national media tuning in to San Francisco's latest culture war, it was the perfect anecdote: A hip new Mission District restaurant called Local’s Corner allegedly wouldn’t serve a local family.
For El Tecolote, the bilingual outlet that broke the news, it was exactly the kind of story the publication has sought to tell for 44 years.
“It was really old-school journalism,” said former El Tecolote editor in chief Gabriela Sierra Alonso, who wrote the story and lived a block away from the restaurant at the time. “We really served our purpose because who else is going to cover the story from that angle?”
On Cesar Chavez Day 2013, Sandy Cuandra, a longtime Mission District resident, said she and five members of her family were refused service at Local’s Corner. Restaurant staff told her that their party was too big for the 28-seat establishment, she said, but the restaurant was practically empty at the time.
“We did not want to think that we were turned away because we are all Latino but there was no reason why we were turned away,” she wrote in an in an e-mail to 50 friends and local leaders, plus El Tecolote.
“It became sort of the case study about how people were feeling about the neighborhood,” said Alonso, who is now attending graduate school in New York. “The owner is from New York City, and he is a transplant, so to speak. And he’s called his establishment Local’s Corner, and he’s allegedly denied locals service.”
Restaurant owner Yaron Milgrom said El Tecolote took the customer’s complaint as fact, not an allegation.
But Juan Gonzales, who founded El Tecolote fresh out of journalism school at San Francisco State University, stands by the story.
“Here’s a real incident that happened that speaks to the whole issue of gentrification,” Gonzales said. “There were lessons to be learned.”
El Tecolote has one full-time employee. Its leaders invite the public to contribute story ideas. It only recently began publishing stories online before they appear in print. And soon, this Mission District icon that has long covered and advocated for the city’s Latino population will follow the Latino diaspora out of the neighborhood with its own series of changes.
Yet El Tecolote is still doing the kind of muckraking that Gonzales first envisioned.
The son of U.S.-born farmworkers from Stockton, Gonzales wanted to be a photographer for Life or Look magazine when he started journalism school. Soon, he became politically energized by the student strikes on campus and the growing Chicano movement.
To get published, he proposed a five-part series on the changes going on then in the Mission District, where he was living, and the new generation of Latino leaders that was emerging. When he graduated, his opus blossomed into a publication. He went on to teach at S.F. State and City College of San Francisco — where he still chairs the journalism department — and has funneled hundreds of his students through El Tecolote.
“I figured I’d do it for five years and move on,” said Gonzales, a burly 67-year-old with a gravelly voice. Gonzales stayed because of the feedback he got from a community that has been perpetually starved for representation. Even today.
Keeping El Tecolote afloat often has been a financial struggle.
During the past three years, however, it has pulled its finances together. With a print circulation of 10,000, it nearly reached its yearly advertising revenue goal by August this year. More than 150 volunteers helped to write, photograph and translate its stories last year. The publication’s signature logo — the wise owl, also known as tecolote — covers much of one of the yellow walls of its ground-floor 24th Street location.
It is careful about the political advertisements it accepts — they must be in line with the publication’s progressive voice — and avoids taking ads touting liquor or medical marijuana because of the possible deleterious effects on the community, Gonzales said.
One of El Tecolote’s first journalistic triumphs was a story in the mid-1970s about a pregnant young Latina who ended up losing her baby when she was sent home after being unable to communicate with staff at San Francisco General Hospital. Protests followed, and the hospital soon beefed up its bilingual staff.
“If you pay enough attention to these issues, some group is going to form or something is going to happen to kind of move on these issues,” Gonzales said.
The recent Local’s Corner incident became one of those stories. Activists incensed by the allegations in the story staged protests outside the restaurant.
Vandals spray-painted “Get out” and “Keep the Mission brown” across its front wall.
A brick crashed through the restaurant’s window.
The neighborhood’s demographic changes — with many Latinos moving to Daly City, Oakland and elsewhere — are also affecting El Tecolote, said Georgiana Hernandez, executive director of Accion Latina, the nonprofit that oversees El Tecolote.
And El Tecolote — located between a panaderia and a new gourmet sausage restaurant on 24th Street — is in the middle of change.
“We know that for us to stay current, for us to meet our mission, we need to go where our primary audiences are going,” Hernandez said. “And for us, that means not only changes in where we distribute but what we cover.”
Even so, the paper plans to remodel its current storefront by knocking out a front wall and replacing it with a display case that would showcase the decades of original art the paper has published.
Hernandez envisioned it as a statement to the neighborhood.
“It would say, ‘We’re here. We’re not going anywhere,’ ” she said.